Thursday, October 7, 2010

Apple announced that they have removed the restriction on 3rd-party development tools for creating applications for iOS devices. From Adobe’s perspective this is of course great news. Since the announcement, I have seen a lot of confusing new stories, tweets, and comments about what this actually means so let me clarify things a bit.

What this meansThis theoretically allow developers to use the Flash CS5 iPhone packager to create applications for the iPhone and iPad. We also announced yesterday that we will resume development work on the packager.

What this does NOT meanThis does not mean that the Flash Player will be coming to iOS as part of Mobile Safari. It also doesn’t mean that AIR will be natively supported as it will be on Android.

So this is great news for Flash developers who want to target iOS devices with their applications. I truly hope that quality applications built using Flash will finally be able to make it onto the app store. Only time will tell but I am cautiously optimistic.